Re: How to make more space available for /
On Sun, 28 Sep 2014 16:55:07 +1000
Rob Hurle <rob1940@gmail.com> wrote:
> I've had a very large job on the go and have only just now had the
> chance to upgrade from squeeze to wheezy. I had to do the upgrade
> from DVDs because I live at the end of a piece of wet string (takes
> about a day to download one DVD).
Go to the library or some place and download it there.
At this point I could go on a rant about the US falling farther and
farther behind on Internet delivery, but so many windmills, so little
time.
> The upgrade went reasonably well
> but I did run out of room on /usr. I've now symlinked /usr/share
> and /usr/lib to a larger disc (200GB). Now, I need to do the upgrade
> of the wheezy system and the complaint is that there's not enough
> room on / (I use apt-get to do upgrades and it appears that I need a
> new kernel and dpkg can't find room on /).
Do you mean you're upgrading to Jessie? Me, I'd have installed fresh,
rather than go through two upgrades, but that's just me.
> / is a partition of 330MB
> (seemed a lot when I installed squeeze a jillion years ago), but
> what I'd like to do is to install a larger disc (maybe 200-500GB) and
> use it as my boot disc.
> Any ideas on how I can copy my existing /
> partition and boot information to a new disc? Would dd be a good
> idea?
Use a second computer to do the partition. You could boot System Rescue
CD and use parted, if nothing else. Make sure you've decided all
partition sizes ahead of time. If your setup has an MBR rather than GPD,
you can use dd to send your old MBR to a file, copy that file to the new
computer, dd the file to the new disk's first sector.
Personally, I'd use rsync to transfer the data. If you'd used dd, you
would have ended up with the same partition sizes you started with.
> How can I prepare the new disc to be the boot disc and have /
> on it without disturbing my current system?
Answered above.
> Ideally I'd like to set
> the new disc up, alter the order of booting in the setup,
I have no idea what you mean by "alter the order of booting in the
setup"
You can't install this new disk until your big process finishes, so I'd
just leave any order changing til the new disk is on the old box, and
thoroughly backed up.
> reboot to
> the new disc, and then clean the system up. Any ideas on how I can
> (for example) put a new /usr partition on the new disc and
> alter /etc/fstab to mount the new partition as /usr, safely without
> disturbing the existing system?
Yes, you'll do all this stuff on a different computer, using System
Rescue CD as an OS, or Debian, or whatever.
> In these days of udev and UUIDs, can
> we just alter /etc/fstab and still expect partitions to be mounted?
> Any help would be appreciated. Thanks in advance.
I'm glad you mentioned that, because if you get your fstab wrong,
you'll frustratingly fail to boot. Be sure to mount by UUID, and if you
happen to reformat, be sure to change your UUID in fstab.
Personally, if I were in your shoes, I'd do the following:
1. Wait for the job to finish.
2. Back up your hard disk, all the way to the metal, twice.
3. Go to the library or some place with fast, reliable Internet that
will let you sit there installing on a desktop.
4. Download the network installer for the Debian version you want to
install. If you're trying to install anything but Wheezy, it's hard
to get the right network install iso, so ask the people on this list.
5. Install from scratch.
6. Plug in your old disk to a SATA plug on the mobo, and mount each of
its **DATA** partitions, READ ONLY. Using rsync, copy each, in toto,
to some storage place. Something like:
rsync -vaHX /mnt/home/ /scratch/oldbox/home/
7. Back up the machine.
8. Over time, copy relevant data from the /scratch/oldbox/home tree to
the /home tree. Please remember, a lot of what's in /home is old
config that would harm your new installation, so be picky: Copy only
real data that you produced.
As you can probably tell, I'm not a big fan of major version upgrades.
HTH,
SteveT
Steve Litt * http://www.troubleshooters.com/
Troubleshooting Training * Human Performance
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